Susan Ellison
Knowledge Production, Ethics, Solidarity: Stories from the Field Workshop
Studying Aid Workers or Becoming One?: The Perils of Studying Up in Engaged Research
In October of 2003, residents of the city of El Alto laid siege to Bolivia’s capital, La Paz. 1 Political and
development analysts characterized the weeks-long (and largely unarmed) uprising as symptomatic of ailing
democratic institutions and unhealthy, “authoritarian” political practices in the city’s trade unions and
neighborhood associations. In the wake of the unrest, American and European aid agencies flooded El Alto
with an enormous amount of funding under the banner of democracy assistance. One of their flagship
approaches to “deepening democracy” in El Alto was to sponsor “Alternative Dispute Resolution” (ADR)
programs throughout the city to promote a “culture of peace” against El Alto’s supposed “culture of
conflict.” Donors have advanced ADR as both a substitute to the backlogged formal legal system, and as a
means to instill Alteños with deliberative democratic temperaments. Donors have promoted Alternative
Dispute Resolution (ADR) through training workshops, public forums, and especially through the creation
of a national program of Integrated Justice Centers meant to pull Bolivians out of the formal legal system. Yet
since 2008, ADR and allied democracy promotion programs have become entangled in a larger national
debate over who sets the terms of democracy and what justice should look like in plurinational2 Bolivia. The
political conflagration has tended to focus on whether American aid has supported president Evo Morales’3
opposition — particularly right wing parties and NGOs in the eastern lowland region. My research examines
the unfolding (geo)politics of foreign funded conflict resolution programs as they have become entangled
with Andean kinship practices, local political tactics, and postcolonial governance projects alike, precipitating
the hyperpoliticization of these ostensibly apolitical, technocratic aid programs.
In many ways, my research agenda dates back to the initial grief, uncertainty, and recovery that followed
octubre negro (Black October). At the time I was working as the facilitator (2001-2005) for a national network of
Bolivian grassroots groups, NGOs, and faith-based organizations that had come together to examine the
structural causes of poverty in Bolivia. Neither my colleagues nor I knew much about the programs targeting
El Alto. What we did know was that a funding surge had hit the city, and many NGOs and grassroots groups
were scrambling to apply for those resources. My Bolivian colleagues — who included NGO workers, Leftist
community organizers and union leaders, and indigenous Liberation Theologians — hotly debated what to do
with that funding, and whose interests it ultimately served. Some saw it as a welcome opportunity to really
delve into the social, political, and economic demands expressed in the “October Agenda,” as it became
known. Others flatly rejected the funding, expressing deep skepticism of its origins, intent, and the interests it
served. They insisted that it would be too hard to maintain independence from what they (rightly) perceived
as a highly ideological aid platform. While the first groups saw external funding as a resource for opening
space to engage in an emancipatory politics, the second believed such a project would always be
circumscribed by donor agendas. A third contingent took a more ambivalent position, condemning the
unequal power relations created by foreign aid in Bolivia more generally, while arguing that the aid was
nevertheless useful to redress inequality and improve democratic institutions in the country. Rather than
criticizing political meddling, they pointed to the inflated salaries paid to foreign consultants, the resources
that went into overhead costs rather than programming, the paternalistic relationships it reproduced.
El Alto is comprised largely of rural indigenous migrants and former miners who were displaced from Bolivia’s mining
centers during the 1980s and 1990s – following the introduction of stringent structural adjustment policies. The
confluence of populations – and the rapidity of their migration to El Alto – had a striking effect upon the social and
political organization of the city. As Arbona and Kohl explain, “This intense migration has created a political culture that
combines aspects of trade unionism with traditional forms of land-based organization within a context of marked
economic insecurity and social frustration” (2004: 258).
2 Bolivia’s new Constitution (adopted in 2009) incorporated the term Plurinational – replacing the term “Republic” – to
underscore the Morales Administration’s intention of elevating status and power of indigenous peoples as coeval to
mestizo and European-descendent Bolivians.
3 Morales is Bolivia’s first indigenous president (elected 2005). His political career began as an union leader for Bolivia’s
cocaleros (coca growers union), and was an outspoken critic of American drug interdiction policies. He later formed
Bolivia’s Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party.
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Susan Ellison
Knowledge Production, Ethics, Solidarity: Stories from the Field Workshop
When I returned to Bolivia in 2008 to conduct pre-dissertation research, I wanted to design a project that
would speak to these ongoing dilemmas. My experience up to that point had been working with social
movements in Bolivia; I wondered what I had to offer to the unfolding debate. Some of my interlocutors
thought I should be studying indigenous movements, the push for indigenous autonomy, and justicia
comunitaria (traditional or community justice) as the vanguard in promoting plural and alternative visions for
the good life (vivir bien) based in indigenous cosmovisión. Indigenous movements have been building in Bolivia
since the 1970s, but the Morales’ administration has elevated these projects as foundational to its
decolonization platform. El proceso de cambio or “the process of change” has become shorthand for that
decolonization agenda; Alteños regularly invoke the phrase as a litmus test for policies and political allegiances
that further their cause or stand in opposition to it. Given my own political commitments, many of my
conversation partners thought it was obvious that I should be helping to spotlight these alternative political
projects. They expected I would be working in a rural community like Jesus de Machaca, and indeed, many
scholars and activists have flocked to that community – the first to formally file for recognition as an
indigenous autonomy. And yet, I was more persuaded by other conversation partners, who encouraged me to
study the conflagration over foreign aid programs in the country. As I considered my project, Bolivian
sociologist Silvia Rivera said to me, “You are in a unique position as an American to have access to these
institutions — access a Bolivian researcher probably would not have.” I agreed with her. My dilemma was
how to position myself as an ally to these broader emancipatory projects while nevertheless electing to go
another route with my research topic – namely “studying up” aid institutions.
As I conducted ethnographic research, other doubts have emerged. Would Rivera recognize the project we
discussed in her office in the dissertation I just submitted to my committee? Would my activist friends find
my framing useful for their own emancipatory projects? As I have followed the social life of Alternative
Dispute Resolution (ADR), that process has sometimes led me away from the questions I originally
formulated in my desire to produce engaged scholarship. Generally I think that’s a good thing – fieldwork has
led me to a more complex set of questions and issues. However, I found that my own positioning as a
researcher working inside one of these institutions during my fieldwork was raising many other ethical-political
dilemmas.
I had structured my project along the lines of what Janine Wedel has called “studying up and through,” or
“tracking policy discourses, prescriptions and programs and then linking them to those affected by the
policies” (2005: 37). I spent 17 months working in foreign-funded legal aid centers, conflict resolution
programs, and the criminal courts El Alto and La Paz, interviewing donor representatives and Bolivian aid
brokers, NGO workers and officials in the Morales Administration. But the vast majority of my time was
spent working in one of El Alto’s Integrated Justice Centers – originally sponsored by USAID, but now run
by the Bolivian Ministry of Justice. On a daily basis I did intake with Center clients, registering detailed
histories of domestic violence, interpersonal conflicts, and various other problems that brought residents to
the legal aid center — from formalizing land titles to fights over inheritance and mounting debts with friends
and kin. These day-to-day tasks included orienting clients about their legal and non-legal options, setting-up
conciliation appointments, and drafting transfer letters to other agencies (e.g. the forensic medical examiner,
psychological services, child protective services, among others). I watched as clients utilized ADR in ways
foreign donors had never intended – especially women who pursued conciliation documents as a form of
leverage with violent domestic partners, and who often eschewed domestic violence litigation in order to first
grapple with crushing microcredit payments, which could not wait. Through my work at the Center, my aim
was to try to connect the geopolitical to the intimate experiences of violence and insecurity in Bolivia, to
show how these macro political debates play out in people’s everyday lives. But the work itself began to raise
serious questions about how to maintain a critical position vis-à-vis ADR programs as I was working inside of
them. In anthropological fashion, let me offer a vignette to illustrate one such dilemma.
When I first met Asusena, she was a recently appointed intern at the Integrated Justice Center and was highly
suspicious of the conciliation component of our legal aid work. She came from a background of working as
an unpaid intern in the courts, and scoffed at the notion that Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) could
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Susan Ellison
Knowledge Production, Ethics, Solidarity: Stories from the Field Workshop
really be useful for resolving poor people’s problems. “After so many years working in the courts, you just
can’t convince me in a couple of months that conciliation is better,” she initially shrugged. But she would
encourage clients to try it, she said, because it was her job. During her time at the Center, however, I
witnessed a significant transformation as Asusena herself began to promote conciliation rather enthusiastically
as a more satisfying alternative to the formal legal system. I would catch her eye after listening to her council a
new Center client on the benefits of ADR: “It’s free, faster than the courts, it’s about both parties being
satisfied with the outcome. Isn’t it better to work things out by talking?” Asusena would notice my amused
look, laugh, and roll her eyes. “I know, I know! I’ve been indoctrinated,” she once hooted in mockexasperation. During the course of her work at the Center, Asusena had shifted from being court-centric to
someone who was seriously considering the value of ADR for the clients she served. When I asked, she said
she wasn’t sure if it was because she really believed it, or she had just repeated it enough times that she had
been “indoctrinated.” At the time I laughed alongside Asusena at her dilemma. But pretty soon I started to
wonder if I had been indoctrinated too.
One of the appeals of studying the Integrated Justice Centers was the fact that amid a vitriolic debate over
USAID’s work in Bolivia, they resisted simplistic demonization: there was a sense among both their creators
and ordinary Alteños that the Centers addressed a real need among the population. While the Morales
Administration pointed to American aid and its funding of right-wing NGOs and elite political actors, ADR
advocates argued that the programs they had created were simply offering tangible solutions for the country’s
poor and working classes — particularly women, particularly indigenous people. My own friends, kin, and
former colleagues — many of whom were deeply skeptical of American interests — believed that the work of
the Integrated Justice Centers represented an exception, precisely because they responded to pressing,
concrete problems and offered measurable benefits. And after several months working at the Center, I found
myself often advising taxi cab drivers and shop owners about the services the Centers offered. When my
comadre4 plunked down a huge amount of cash for a lawyer to help her obtain a correction to her birth
certificate, I threw my hands up in exasperation because he was clearly abusing her ignorance of new
regulations that made it easier and cheaper to correct such paperwork through an “administrative” process
rather than the old long-form court procedure. I urged her to go to the nearby Integrated Justice Center
where the staff would help her for free.
Annelise Riles (2002) has argued that ADR, with its emphasis on informality and expertise, poses a challenge
to critical scholars, for “these techniques go beyond the benevolent technocratic paternalism Foucault once
identified as governmentality. They appeal, rather, to a new market-inspired rationale of providing a service,
filling a need, or solving a problem people surely want solved” (613). What makes this appealing quality of
ADR dangerous, according to Riles, is how slippery it is; it produces the “hegemonic institutionalization of a
heady fantasy of liberal communication, a hope that political conflict can be resolved through new and ever
more technological solutions” (618). It is now a maxim among anthropologists that Alternative Dispute
Resolution’s (ADR) toolkit erases politics and power while gesturing toward them, acknowledging their
absence and therefore pre-empting critique. Like many of the ambivalent aid intermediaries, NGO workers,
and ADR advocates I encountered during my fieldwork, I found myself confounded between my own
intellectual and political commitments to critique – to illuminating what I believe are the more insidious
dimensions of these seemingly-innocuous aid programs – and my desire to address the immediate needs of
Center clients, friends, and kin, who often pursued ADR to “make do” amid everyday violence and
deepening economic insecurity.
Co-mother or the mother of my goddaughter. Compadrazgo is one of the principal ways Bolivians construct kinship
relations in Bolivia. My long-standing relations with my own compadres has played an enormous role in my dissertation
research as well as my commitments to engaged scholarship. In addition to my conversations with Bolivian scholars and
social movement activists, it was my conversations with my compadres, their struggles and concerns, that have most
influenced my concern for what Povinelli calls “the ordinary, the chronic, and cruddy rather than catastrophic, crisisladen, and sublime” (2011: 3).
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Susan Ellison
Knowledge Production, Ethics, Solidarity: Stories from the Field Workshop
Over those 17 months, I developed many critiques of how ADR programs depoliticized broader patterns of
social conflict and obscured violence. In my dissertation I show how ADR has touched down in Bolivia amid
parallel efforts to produce entrepreneurial and counterinsurgent citizens, a citizenry that turns inward for the
resolution of its problems rather that toward collective action, where political protests are derided as antidemocratic and destabilizing, authoritarian, and illiberal. But I could not deny the seductive power of
institutions that allowed people to cobble together the means to survive and experience some relief. Even if
ADR is an expression of a neoliberal rationality, for many Alteños it is also a mechanism to cope with
neoliberalism’s effects.
I have found that these local practices and strategies sometimes converge with donor agendas — despite (or
perhaps thanks to) the appropriations and translations of local actors. But in the process of studying ADR, I
too converged on the solutions they offered. I think those entanglements are illustrative of precisely why the
Integrated Justice Centers – and the broader constellation of “conflict resolution” and peacemaking programs
that accompanied them – begged for a more complex interpretation than they were receiving. In Bolivia, the
line between scholar and public intellectual is virtually non-existent – the notion of disengaged scholarship is
a strange, artificial distinction for most people I know. Engaged research takes many forms. For example, a
group of Aymara intellectuals founded the Taller Historia Oral Andina (Andean Oral History Workshop or
THOA) to put their scholarship explicitly in the service of an emancipatory Indianist politics, aiming to decenter Western historiography and promote the reconstitution of Bolivia’s indigenous Ayllus system of
political organization, among other decolonizing projects. Vice President Álvaro García Linera – a sociologist
who is still publishing books and articles – was a professor and political commentator prior to his election.
García Linera regularly hosts critical scholars ranging from Slavoj Žižek and Samir Amin to Boaventura de
Sousa Santos and Judith Revel, among others, and makes explicit connections between the country’s pursuit
of an emancipatory politics and critical theory. But Bolivian social scientists are often employed by foreign
donors, NGO projects, and UN agencies; Bolivian academics regularly cobble together incomes from
teaching and applied work with la cooperación internacional (foreign donors). They now find themselves ensnared
in these same debates about whether and how foreign aid agendas and NGO “project mentality” has
excessively shaped national politics and social movement activism. As a consequence, activists and academics
are all rather entangled in these efforts to rehabilitate Bolivian institutions — and Bolivians themselves.
In country where virtually no researcher, NGO, or social movement leader operates outside the reach of
foreign funding, ADR raises critical questions about how to enact emancipatory politics in the country, as
well as what similarly-entangled researchers like myself can contribute to that conversation. I sometimes
wonder to what extent my critical edge on these projects has been blunted by my desire to illuminate that
complexity. My challenge in the writing process has been to provide a more nuanced account of these
programs without celebrating complexity at the expense of recognizing hegemony – and the ways that these
foreign aid platforms may have circumscribed the terms of the debate over what democracy and justice
should look like in plurinational Bolivia.
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